A couple of days ago I read a blog post by Stephen Ramsay, a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a Fellow at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. In it, he mentions that he has all but abandoned the GUI and finds the command line to be "faster, easier to understand, easier to integrate, more scalable, more portable, more sustainable, more consistent, and many, many times more flexible than even the most well-thought-out graphical apps." I found this very thought-provoking, because, like Ramsay, I spend a lot of time thinking about "The Future of Computing," and I think that the CLI, an interface from the past, might have a place in the interface of the future.

I think PowerShell may be a better SCRIPTING language, but I don't know if it's a better COMMAND LINE language. The terseness and expressiveness of the generic SH command line is very powerful. The additional lengths and complexity of the the elements in PowerShell warrant more an edit/run lifecycle than simply a type it and go and creating simple one offs that SH promotes.

The terseness and expressiveness of the generic SH command line is very powerful. The additional lengths and complexity of the the elements in PowerShell warrant more

I am curious as to why you find PowerShell have "additional lengths". I do a lot of scripting in PowerShell and I find that it is almost *always* shorter and more concise than the bash equivalent. Do you have any examples?

Also, I find PowerShell is *a lot* more consistent (naming conventions, parsing rules, parameter passing) with fewer specialized single-purpose features. Don't be fooled by PowerShell examples which (for instructive purposes) use the long-name versions of common commands. For the common commands there's often a short alias (which are a true aliases rather then bash "macro" aliases).